Lake Waikaremoana In the Te Urewera national park, Lake Waikaremoana is an idyllic location.  We were especially lucky to have excellent weather in the week between Christmas and New Years 2015. The photo above was taken on the afternoon of the first day hiking, near the Panekire bluff Hut and over looks the southern side of [...]

I usually enjoy MeetUps, but unfortunately they aren’t always awesome. Enduring miserable meetups can be a testing experience at the best of times, and they’re especially awful at the end of a long day.  In this post I explain my thoughts on what to look for, and what to avoid, when it comes to user group [...]

The Xamarin MeetUp is organised and hosted by Josh and Mohit from Datacom, NZ’s largest software specialist company.  Josh runs the Xamarin dev team at Datacom, working mainly with rural enterprise applications.  Mohit is a Microsoft MVP and was encouraged to start the Auckland Xamarin MeetUp after returning from a trip to Redmond, Seattle. In [...]

Email marketing is a mainstay of the Internet economy.  Crafting email content worthy of being read is less common though.  In this post I explain my experience being a subscriber of lists and how your email’s content can prevent people like me from unsubscribing from your mailing list. Happy to be a mailing list subscriber Like most [...]

The first in my series of post MeetUp blog posts, this post reviews the Go Auckland MeetUp.  The Auckland Go MeetUp was an evening full of promise given that the GO programming language is fairly new. The MeetUp began at 6.30pm with complementary pizza and a chance to catch up with fellow software people.  Most in [...]

I have been attending software related MeetUps regularly for about a year now.  The other day one of the Directors where I work asked me, ‘Why do you go to all these MeetUps?’  and,  ‘What do you get out of them?’  and that got me thinking…  This post is my attempt to elucidate the benefits of going [...]

The weather was cold and rain was threatening, nevertheless we made the journey from Auckland to Thames at the edge of the Coromandel ranges in New Zealand with some enthusiasm.  The Coromandel ranges are renowned as a stunning example of native bushland and one of the few remaining in the north-east of New Zealand’s north [...]